Wert's Star Trek: The Next Generation rewatch (now in added HD!)

[Werthead]

Mendon was not a Starfleet officer, despite wearing the uniform.

Revisiting the episode at Memory Alpha, this is correct :)

209: The Measure of a Man (extended cut)

A Starfleet engineer requisitions Data, planning to dissect him to replicate his technology to create a race of androids to serve the Federation. Since this process could destroy Data, and certainly erase his personality, Data refuses to comply. When Starfleet orders him to, he tries to resign. Starfleet declares him their property to do with as they decide, a decision Picard challenges in court. A hearing is held, but as the senior officers present Picard is assigned to handle the defence...and Riker the prosecution.

Written by SF novelist and Wild Cards writer Melinda Snodgrass (who ran some early ideas for the script past GRRM), The Measure of a Man is the type of thoughtful, intelligent SF that Star Trek is famed for but actually pulls off quite rarely. The episode delves into the question of Data's sentience and rights and does so without giving easy answers. Great performances all round, with the extended edition giving us a few new character scenes which help the story resonate more strongly. TNG's first unquestionable classic episode.

210: The Dauphin

WESLEY CRUSHER ROMANCE EPISODE.

NO.

211: Contagion

The Enterprise responds to a call for assistance from her sister ship, the USS Yamato, which is in the Neutral Zone on an unknown mission. Captain Varley tells Picard that he has been following leads which have led him to the homeworld of the Iconians, a powerful star empire which ruled this part of the Galaxy some 200,000 years ago. Some of the Iconians' advanced technology remains intact and Varley fears it falling into the hands of the Romulans. However, the Yamato has been suffering significant systems failures for the last few days, hampering its efforts to investigate. Suddenly, the Yamato's warp core magnetic shields fail and the ship explodes, killing all 1,000 crewmembers on board. It transpires that an Iconian computer virus destroyed the Yamato...and is now loose on the Enterprise. As the Enterprise and a Romulan warbird spying on the situation are both threatened with destruction, Picard has to unravel the secrets of the Iconians.

A pretty hardcore start to the episode, although the deaths of a thousand people (including children) and one of Picard's oldest friends are swept under the carpet pretty quickly. After this the episode becomes a bit of a romp with comedic undertones, most notably LaForge and Data's bizarre dialogue exchange when the former is electrocuted by a panel. Carolyn Seymour is underused as the Romulan commander, but otherwise this is a fine romp of an episode. It's a bit dumb (the total ignorance of the crew on how to handle a computer virus is rather laughable) but fun.

Trivia: this is the first episode where Picard says, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."

212: The Royale

The crew of the Enterprise find an odd structure on a totally uninhabitable planet. Riker, Data and Worf beam down to investgiate and, bizarrely, find themselves trapped in what appears to be a 1930s hotel. Shenanigans ensue.

Not a great episode. There is merit in the central idea, but it all feels rather cheap (even the HD re-edit struggles to make the black surface of the planet any more convincing), with poor dialogue and ropey characterisation. An attempt at meta-commentary - the hotel is an unseen alien's recreation of a crappy pulp novel - falls rather flat and overall this is a poor episode. There is an amusing continuity nod, however, when Picard attempts to solve Fermat's last theorem, pointing out it has never been solved. Six years after this episode was aired, it was indeed solved through the Wiles Proof. A later episode of DS9 addressed this issue by suggesting that the Wiles Proof was unsatisfying, requiring advanced mathmatics not known in the time of its creation, and Starfleet officers continued trying to solve it more simply.

213: Time Squared

The Enterprise discovers one of its own shuttles floating in space, with a duplicate of Picard aboard. They discover that the shuttle has come from six hours in the future, when a recording reveals that the Enterprise will be destroyed by an energy vortex of unknown origin. Picard becomes obsessed with finding a way of avoiding this fate, but every step he takes seems to make it more inevitable.

A creepy, intense episode which gives Patrick Stewart a chance to shine as Picard's frustration over not being in control of the situation boils over. There's some terrific visual effects for the time and some clever use of split screen to have two Picards on-screen at once. The biggest false note is the ending, in which Picard phasers his other self to death. Stunning him (he vanishes regardless once the temporal paradox is resolved) would seem more logical, though admittedly lacking in drama. Another potential problem arises since the explanation for the vortex - Q caused it to make life interesting, as he should have revealed in dialogue cut from Q Who? a few episodes later - was never revealed, but this actually just makes it more interesting.

214: The Icarus Factor

Riker gets offered a promotion and his dad turns up to brief him, only they don't get along, so they resolve their ISSUES by hitting one another with big sticks, which causes Riker to resolve his emotional issues and decide to stay on the Enterprise. Why? Who the hell knows? Meanwhile, Worf is having a bad day so his crewmates decide to help him out, with comically agonising results.

There is a school of thought that American television drama seems to be obsessed by the relationship between children and their fathers. Many different TV shows seem to spend immense amounts of time dwelling on one of the main characters' problematic relationships with their father and their attempts to resolve issues. I don't know why, but it seems fairly consistent across SFF shows (as SFF critic Andy Lane wrote in response to Franklin's father issues in the GROPOS episode of Babylon 5, it would be unfathomable for an episode of a UK series like, say, Blake's 7 to be dedicated to such an issue). It also makes for totally bollocks drama, as this episode shows. I could go a whole lifetime without hearing another variation of, "Goddamnit son, I loved your mother too!"-style dialogue.

The subplot, in which Worf is grumpy and his colleagues' attempts to cheer him up spectacularly backfire, is far more amusing. There's also some amusing development of O'Brien, in a scene where he and Riker debate the problems of 'career' or 'relationships', only for 'family' to win out as the most stressful thing in a person's life.

[Werthead]

215: Pen Pals

Data makes friends with a little girl on a distant planet by subspace radio. With the planet about to be laid waste in a geological catastrophe, Data emotionally blackmails Picard into breaking the Prime Directive and saving the planet. This actually happens.

A weird one. The premise has merit, the subplot is reasonable (Wesley learns how to command other officers on an assignment, with surprisingly non-vomit-inducing results) and there's some great incidental slice-of-life moments on the Enterprise, such as Picard having an appreciation for horses that does not violate his longstanding apathy towards pets. However, the idea that Data would knowingly violate the Prime Directive for six weeks continuously before alerting Picard to what was going on seems highly out of character, as are his escalating violations of orders and Starfleet policy. The writing cheats a little here, both to get a cheap emotional response and to maneuver the crew into a position where they have to help the aliens. Annoying as other elements - the crisis is resolved by teamwork and weeks of intensive research rather than some last-minute deus ex machina - have a lot of potential.

216: Q Who?

Q, now in exile from the Q Continuum, appears and gives Picard a tempting offer: allow Q permanent residence on the Enterprise in return for having access to vast amount of knowledge about the dangerous new regions of the Galaxy that the Federation is expanding into. Picard replies - somewhat arrogantly - that they don't need him as they can handle anything. In response Q chooses to teach Picard a lesson: he throws the Enterprise 7,000 light-years - two years from Federation territory at maximum warp - into unknown space and vanishes.The Enterprise quickly encounters a ship belonging to the cybernetic Borg and lose eighteen crewmembers in a skirmish. Every time the Borg attack the Enterprise the crew are able to defeat the incursion...until the Borg develop a counter-technique. Eventually the Enterprise is overwhelmed and about to be destroyed, only for Picard to beg Q for help and admit that he was wrong. Q returns the Enterprise to Federation territory, warning the crew that if they can't take a bloody nose they shouldn't be out here.

The best Q episode ever, the finest episode of Season 2 and one of the best Star Trek episodes ever and easily the most striking introduction of a recurring villain in Star Trek's history. Whilst it's easy to get caught up in how badass the Borg are, the reason the episode works so well is pretty straightforward: the crew are outmatched and lose, badly. They survive purely to the fact that they have a (somewhat) sympathetic omnipotent god-being to appeal to. In fact, this episode really unsettled Patrick Stewart, who initially objected to the way the story ended. His view - and Roddenberry's - were that the Enterprise crew should be able to handle anything. However, they were argued around by the dramatic strength of the finale and by the fact that kicking the crew in their complacency was a good way of firing up the audience, who were perhaps getting a little too confident about their heroes. This can be seen in Stewart's excellent performance throughout, but particularly in his final scene with Q. Stewart received some unexpected motivation for filming this scene: the director and Jonathan Frakes had been joking around before filming the scene, annoying Stewart who'd been trying to get into the zone. The resulting stress makes the scene play all the more effectively.

The episode also works because it makes Q work, and we get some empathy for Q and a sense of his POV (some of Picard's assertions really are arrogant, and as irritating to the viewer as to Q). John de Lancie has been brilliant since Day 1 of the pilot, of course, but in this episode he is simply outstanding. The scene where he tells Picard it is no illusion that eighteen of his crewmen are dead is particularly intense: "This is as real as your so-called life gets." He manipulates the crew but arguably for their own good. As Picard indicates later on, Q may have gotten them into the mess in the first place and alerted the Borg to the existence of the Federation (we'll ignore the half-assed attempt to integrate the episode with The Neutral Zone due to a major shift in writing planning between the two episodes), but he also gave the Federation forewarning of the Borg and a chance to prepare, something that would not have happened otherwise. Whoopi Goldberg is also excellent as Guinan and the exchanges between the two engimatic beings are great fun. Guinan having such a large amount of knowledge about the Borg is a little hard to swallow though. What would have been the problem with her or the other El-Aurian refugees saying to the Federation, "Hey, there's a race of cybernetic nutters out there, be careful," in a more timely fashion?

Still, outstanding. Great effects work (for the time), great acting all round, unsettling music and an excellent script.

217: The Samaritan Snare

Picard and Wesley travel to a starbase where Wesley has exams and Picard has to undergo an operation. Meanwhile, the Enterprise is lured into a trap by a ship of apparently harmless idiots.

From the sublime to the bizarre, The Samaritan Snare introduces the goofy Pakleds, the Federation's most amiably bumbling enemies. There's more holes in the Pakled storyline than in a fishing net, but it's fun. The Picard/Wesley storyline is better than it might sound as well, particularly Picard's recounting of his bar fight with the Nausicans (which becomes crucial to the Season 6 episode Tapestry) which Stewart sells with aplomb. This episode also features the most comedic use of the "Let's ignore Worf's warning of danger even though he's been right a dozen times before!" trope, when Worf's sound advice not to send their chief engineer on a frivolous away mission is completely ignored (for absolutely no reason) by Riker, only for Troi to come in and start saying the same thing and everyone to start crapping themselves in terror. I imagine Worf seething in fury at this (and he does look pissed off in the relevant scenes).

[Galactus]

Iconians, a powerful star empire which ruled this part of the Galaxy some 200,000 years ago.

From what I heard, they ended up as the Big Bads of Star Trek Online.

[Maltaran]

The Iconians also come up in an episode of DS9 (specifically, the one in which Weyoun first appears). Worf refers to the time he visited their homeworld.

[Rhom]

From what I heard, they ended up as the Big Bads of Star Trek Online.

For the most part, yes. I haven't played in over a year, but they and the Borg seemed to be the main antagonists.

[Rhom]

217: The Samaritan Snare

Picard and Wesley travel to a starbase where Wesley has exams and Picard has to undergo an operation. Meanwhile, the Enterprise is lured into a trap by a ship of apparently harmless idiots.

From the sublime to the bizarre, The Samaritan Snare introduces the goofy Pakleds, the Federation's most amiably bumbling enemies. There's more holes in the Pakled storyline than in a fishing net, but it's fun. The Picard/Wesley storyline is better than it might sound as well, particularly Picard's recounting of his bar fight with the Nausicans (which becomes crucial to the Season 6 episode Tapestry) which Stewart sells with aplomb. This episode also features the most comedic use of the "Let's ignore Worf's warning of danger even though he's been right a dozen times before!" trope, when Worf's sound advice not to send their chief engineer on a frivolous away mission is completely ignored (for absolutely no reason) by Riker, only for Troi to come in and start saying the same thing and everyone to start crapping themselves in terror. I imagine Worf seething in fury at this (and he does look pissed off in the relevant scenes).

I was talking with someone about this episode the other day after they mentioned they had seen Nemesis for the first time. I told them that this episode is a perfect example of how the movie writers blatantly ignore nuances of the character. To the best of my recollection, Picard tells Wesley here that he was very reckless as a young man until he was taught a lesson by being stabbed in the heart in this bar fight. Young Picard looks down at the spear in his chest and laughs. (Actually... As I type this I wonder if I'm confusing it with the other episode Wert mentions. Regardless, my eventual point stands!)

So the whole plot of Nemesis is that (guess I ought to spoiler this)

Shinzon is a Picard clone but the difference is that he doesn't have Picard's life experiences. In the climax he even dies by being stabbed through the chest! The writers have a great chance to remind us of who Picard is and even question a bit how much of who we are could be cloned. All Shinzon has to do is look down... And laugh. Instead, nothing. He dies, the heroes fly off and Data becomes Spock from Star Trek 3. End movie.

So that's my gripe about Nemesis where it pertains to this episode. I think the fight with the Nausicans is my favorite bit of Picard lore. Well; that and his mysterious hook up with Dr. Crusher!

[Werthead]

218: Up the Long Ladder

The Enterprise crew encounter a planet of generic Irish stereotypes and a planet of infertile clones. The generic Irish stereotypes need a new home. After 44 minutes, the Enterprise crew suddenly hit upon an astonishing solution: ship the generic Irish stereotypes over to the clone planet and help them out with their fertility problem! Simples!

An astonishingly awful episode, packed with offensive caricatures (the generic Irish stereotypes have pigs and chickens! They're brewing hooch in the cargo bay!) and poor dialogue. The stuff on the clone planet has more potential, and it's always great to see Dr. Pulaski in action (in retrospect I think I'd rather she'd stuck around than having Beverly Crusher return), but overall it's just bad. Not one of Melinda Snodgrass's finer moments, it has to be said.

219: Manhunt

The Enterprise is travelling to a peace conference, but Picard is stressed because the Betazed ambassador - Lwaxana Troi of course - is intent on ravishing him. He hides in his holodeck Dixon Hill programme, only for Lwaxana to track him down. Hilarity ensues.

This isn't quite as bad as it sounds. The Dixon Hill stuff is amusing, Patrick Steward and Majel Barrett do have some great comic chemistry going on and the episode subverts the normal 'evil aliens up to no good' storyline by introducing and resolving it in four lines of dialogue in the closing seconds of the episode. Also, it features a cameo by a completely unrecognisable Mick Fleetwood as one of the giant fish-aliens, which is random even by Star Trek's standards. There's a few good gags amongst the misfires as well. It benefits a lot from being watched just after the abominable Up the Long Ladder as well.

220: The Emissary

The Worf Saga continues. The Enterprise is ordered to intercept a 'sleeper' Klingon warship whose crew have been in suspended animation for more than a century and believe themselves to still be at war with the Federation. A Klingon emissary, K'Ehleyr, is sent aboard to advise on the situation, but it turns out that she has History with Worf.

Quite a strong episode, with Michael Dorn and Suzie Plakson bringing some spirited performances to liven up some often ropey dialogue between their characters. The sleeper ship storyline is fairly tense (though surprisingly is relegated to the B-plot) and Worf's solution is entertaining. There's also a quite nice scene where Worf tries to ask Picard to be reassigned, only to realise he's being a dickhead and withdrawing the request (to Picard's evident professional approval). Worf has probably the most satisfying character arc on the entire show (TNG or DS9), and this episode is an important step on that evolution. A winner.

221: Peak Performance

Riker takes command of an abandoned Federation starship and has a few days to get it working before engaging the Enterprise in a war games scenario. Predictably, things go awry.

This episode has some serious problems in its premise: why is the Enterprise fighting an ancient, outmoded old starship? The Enterprise is so superior that the other ship shouldn't even be able to dent it. In addition, why can't this sort of simulation be run in the holodeck? And does it make sense for Riker to be able to recruit the entire senior crew of the Enterprise (Data and Picard excepted) to help him out?

Once you get over the lack of logic, it does evolve into an entertaining episode. Wesley does a few dodgy things you can't imagine him doing a season earlier and Roy Brocksmith is supremely punchable as the smug-git tactical advisor who develops a rivalry with Data. The Ferengi add little to the episode, though, and it's odd to bring them in as a dangerous enemy when they've basically just been retired from that role due to the introduction of the Borg. Overall, moronic but fun.

222: Shades of Grey

Complete. And. Total. Bullshit. Possibly the worst episode of all time, not just Star Trek but maybe of any series, ever. Okay, it's a clip show. They've run out of money. Fair enough. But even so most people could have strung something better together than this total pile of tosh. RARGH!

Season 3 will be out in a couple of weeks, when the rewatch will resume.

[Rhom]

222: Shades of Grey

Complete. And. Total. Bullshit. Possibly the worst episode of all time, not just Star Trek but maybe of any series, ever. Okay, it's a clip show. They've run out of money. Fair enough. But even so most people could have strung something better together than this total pile of tosh. RARGH!

Season 3 will be out in a couple of weeks, when the rewatch will resume.

I don't remember Shades of Grey... will have to use my google fu.

[DaveSumm]

Wert, have you or will you ever do a DS9 rewatch thread? I'd like to read that. I foolishly wrote off DS9 when it was on and I'm now rewatching Season 1. It's incredible how different it is to TNG, which I've been interspersing with it. It's great to watch Star Trek when I've only a vague memory of episodes or none at all. TNG I must have seen all of at least four times, it's repeated far more often.

Be good to read that some else finds Sisko's strange whooping noise at discovering he's back on the beach extremely odd. Or that he very suddenly decides that he should be 120% happier all the time in S2.

[Raksha the Demon]

Wert, have you or will you ever do a DS9 rewatch thread? I'd like to read that. I foolishly wrote off DS9 when it was on and I'm now rewatching Season 1. It's incredible how different it is to TNG, which I've been interspersing with it. It's great to watch Star Trek when I've only a vague memory of episodes or none at all. TNG I must have seen all of at least four times, it's repeated far more often.

Be good to read that some else finds Sisko's strange whooping noise at discovering he's back on the beach extremely odd. Or that he very suddenly decides that he should be 120% happier all the time in S2.

DS:9 is my all-time favorite of all the Trek TV series, though I've enjoyed some TNG episodes and many of the original series. I do remember Sisko's peculiar whooping noise at the beach. I wondered whether it was joy that he was back at the place where he first met his wife mingled with a sudden awareness that the sand was hot and he was barefoot (it's been years since I've seen it and can't remember if Sisko dropped back into that moment on the beach in bathing attire or Starfleet uniform)?

[Werthead]

Wert, have you or will you ever do a DS9 rewatch thread? I'd like to read that. I foolishly wrote off DS9 when it was on and I'm now rewatching Season 1. It's incredible how different it is to TNG, which I've been interspersing with it. It's great to watch Star Trek when I've only a vague memory of episodes or none at all. TNG I must have seen all of at least four times, it's repeated far more often.

Be good to read that some else finds Sisko's strange whooping noise at discovering he's back on the beach extremely odd. Or that he very suddenly decides that he should be 120% happier all the time in S2.

Yes. In 2007-08 I did an extensive Star Trek Deep Space Nine rewatch. It was comprehensive. It was beautiful. It was, quite literally, the greatest thing I've ever written. It may be modest to say it, but I think there is a very good chance it was the single towering achievement of humanity to this time.

Then the board inexplicably lost it. And I hadn't saved any of the entries to another file :crying:

My B5 rewatch thread (or rather the first half of it) is still extant here. Part 2 seems to have vanished, but I did back the whole thing up.

[Aemon Stark]

We did start another DS9 rewatch in the summer. See here. Sadly no one replied when I bumped it in March. :(

[Mr. X]

I don't remember Shades of Grey... will have to use my google fu.

You don't really need to remember it.

[felice]

We did start another DS9 rewatch in the summer. See here. Sadly no one replied when I bumped it in March. :(

Wait for the blu-rays; it should get more attention then.

[Rhom]

You don't really need to remember it.

Just looked it up... Hmmmmm. Suppose there's a good reason I don't remember it. A show retrospective in the second season would certainly be a bit limited...

[DaveSumm]

Yes. In 2007-08 I did an extensive Star Trek Deep Space Nine rewatch. It was comprehensive. It was beautiful. It was, quite literally, the greatest thing I've ever written. It may be modest to say it, but I think there is a very good chance it was the single towering achievement of humanity to this time.

Then the board inexplicably lost it. And I hadn't saved any of the entries to another file :crying:

Ahhhhh gutted. Well, we could always start over. I'll start.

Pilot: Sisko makes a strange whooping noise upon discovering he's back on the beach where he met his wife.

[Jaxom 1974]

Shades of Gray was money issues and the writers stroke, was it not?

[Rhom]

Shades of Gray was money issues and the writers stroke, was it not?

I read that it was a writer's strike, however a writer's stroke might be a better explanation! :lol:

[Werthead]

Shades of Gray was money issues and the writers stroke, was it not?

They should have just gone with 21 episodes for the season, which is what would happen today; when DS9 ran out of money in Season 1 they actually forewent any such cost-cutting measures and just had 20 episodes. Flashback episodes were unfortunately part of the standard 'writer's toolbox' in 1988 and weren't as reviled as they are today (to the point where Community can do a whole, excellent episode taking the mick out of them).

[Werthead]

Season 3!

For the new blu-ray release, I watched the behind-the-scenes stuff first. This takes the form of a three-part retrospective on the season and also a writers' roundtable chaired by Seth 'Family Guy' MacFarlane (who has some pretty oddball choices for favourite episodes, such as the execrable Genesis) and featuring Brannon Braga (the guy who gets shit upon for pretty much everything that went wrong on Voyager, Enterprise and the final season of TNG), Ronald D. Moore, Naren Shankar and Rene Echevarria. Most of these features are dedicated to the fact that the writing situation on Season 3 was total and utter chaos. New showrunner Michael Piller came aboard and saved the show by mandating that each episode had to focus on the core cast rather than the guest star of the week. He also wrote tons of small character-based scenes (known as 'Piller filler') which gave more of a sense of the Enterprise crew working as a community and a group of friends, sometimes even having conversations that didn't involve technobabble.

However, Piller's contribution is here analysed more carefully, and the other writers acknowledge that Piller, whilst fair, open and honest, was also very much coming from the background of being a network suit and couldn't be budged once he made a decision. He also wrote extensive notes and rewrites for everyone else's scripts, but when he wrote The Best of Both Worlds he just went off and did it by himself with no feedback from anyone. Whilst his right, it also seems a bit unfair to the other writers who had to undergo a thorough vetting process (though since it turned out so well, it's hard to complain too much). The result was that whilst Piller's impact on the scripts and the quality of the show is almost immediately obvious to the viewer and the actors (apart from Gates McFadden, who grumbled at having to use scripts written for Dr. Pulaski for her first few weeks back), it was less noticeable in the writer's room. In fact, the writers were so despondent by the end of the season that they pretty much all left, apart from Piller and Ron Moore. This stuff is so focused on by the documentaries that the actual recording process of Season 3 and feeback from the actors is left entirely until the last of the four documentaries and is rather under-explored. However, we get the story about how Patrick Stewart exerted his growing power on the show to reinstate Gates McFadden, about how Michael Dorn almost never nailed a first take because he'd be trying to get his prosthetic teeth to settle and about how Jonathan Frakes made the jump to directing.

301: Evolution

The Enterprise arrives at a double star system where an immense stellar explosion takes place every 196 years. A scientist who has dedicated twenty years to this moment prepares to launch a probe to study the explosion, but his plans are interrupted when a horde of nanotechnological robots are inadvertently released into the Enterprise's computer system.

"Captain's Log, Stardate 43125.8. Shit just got real."

Right from the start, Star Trek: The Next Generation's third season is clearly working from a different blueprint to the two seasons that preceded it. The writing is more naturalistic, relaxed and character-focused from the off, the special effects take a big jump up in quality (the result of a newer, smaller and more easy-to-use Enterprise model being built, allowing complex effects shots to be filmed in a fraction of the time of using the giant model from the first two seasons) and the crew seem a bit more chilled out thanks to the introduction of the more comfortable two-piece uniforms. There's also a new, moodier title sequence, though unfortunately in HD the awful cut between the new ringed planet and the old Enterprise fly-past is even worse than before. They should have redone the starfield, since I doubt even the most hardened TNG purist would object to that change.

The episode itself is decent, with Wesley for once almost destroying the ship rather than saving it and a solid guest performance from Ken Jenkins as scientist Dr. Stubbs. Continuity is acknowledged with Dr. Crusher's return cramping Wesley's style being a (thankfully) minor subplot. Though tame today, the VFX of the double star system and the Enterprise almost being destroyed was phenomenal at the time. Even the science is surprisingly robust, with a focus on the then-cutting-edge field of nanotechnology. However, the episode is prevented from achieving greatness by its feeling of familiarity: the scenes of the ship suffering extensive technical failures are strongly reminiscent of Season 2's Contagion, whilst the nanites gaining sentience and the difficulties in talking to them feel like a retread of Season 1's Home Soil. Dr. Stubbs' characterisation also feels inconsistent: his scenes with Wesley make the character sympathetic and plausible, but his arrogance elsewhere is simply dull. His revisionist, "Your psychoanalysis is BS!" argument towards Troi is refreshing, even though it was actually meant to make us feel less well-inclined towards him. The episode is entertaining enough and certainly works as a statement of intent about a change of direction, but it's going to be a few weeks before we get the first classic of the season.

302: The Ensigns of Command

The enigmatic alien Sheliak have detected a human colony existing on Tau Cygni V, a world that was ceded to them in a treaty with the Federation. The Sheliak order its removal in just three days. The Enterprise arrives expecting to find the survivors of a shuttle crash, but instead find a substantial town of more than 15,000 individuals who have built up their home over ninety years and do not want to leave. The Enterprise leaves orbit to confront the Sheliak, Picard ordering Data to remain behind and convince the colonists to leave. Data finds this easier said than done.

There's an interesting quote from Ira Steven Behr about Deep Space Nine and TNG: "The 24th Century can be really bland if you don't stay on it." What he meant was that it was very easy for Trek to descend into technobabble, dull scripts and fairly mediocre performances unless everyone stayed on their game. The Ensigns of Command is a good example of this: it's certainly not shit, but it is quite beige as far as episodes go. The guest cast are meh, the script is meh and the effects are meh (the blatant re-use of a spaceship prop from The Search for Spock to supposedly represent a powerful alien race is particularly lazy). The story is also surprisingly cynical, with Data resorting to blowing the shit out of the town once reasoned argument fails to convince the colonists to leave, but even this fails to be particularly interesting. The actor playing Goshavan (out apparent antagonist) is spectacularly boring and has been dubbed over with a voice-over that is also stunningly dull. The subplot, where Picard tries to negotiate with the Sheliak, is more interesting and there's a fine bit of direction where Picard, keeping the Sheliak on hold, inspects the Enterprise dedication plaque for dust. Ultimately the tension in this sequence is undercut by the Enterprise being superior to the Sheliak colony transport and then a bit of cheesy legalese to resolve everything. A further subplot in which LaForge is abjectly defeated by a technical challenge is also amusing, though brief.

Overall, these first two episodes do show an improvement of incidental dialogue and characterisation, but the main plots are still suffering from Star Trek-by-the-numbers-itis.